Ten thousand…

Mmmmm, scalloped potatoes and ham in the slow cooker for tonight! The recipe sure didn’t call for much liquid though… hope it works!

‘Exhibit 3′ in our circumstantial evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, has to do with the key social structures that were so unbelievably important to the Jews’ identity. They did everything they could to reinforce those structures, and it’s part of the reason that there are still Jews today (whereas the Hittites, Ammonites, Babylonians, etc. have disappeared). Explaining how each of them were changed or abandoned by the Christians, Moreland goes through each of the five social structures: animal sacrifice, keeping the Sabbath, monotheism minus the Trinity & incarnation (the possibility of being both man and God at the same time was heresy to them), and the Messiah as a political leader who would destroy the Roman armies. You can likely guess the explanations (or, you could read the book!)

With that context established, Moreland went in for therhetorical kill, drilling me with his intense and unwaveringgaze. "Lee," he said, "how can you possibly explain why in ashort period of time not just one Jew but an entire community ofat least ten thousand Jews were willing to give up these five keypractices that had served them sociologically and theologicallyfor so many centuries? My explanation is simple: they had seenJesus risen from the dead."

Strobel points out that people today find it hard to understand how radical the changes to the social structures would have been for the Jews, since today we are so fluid in our faith and bounce around between many different beliefs. As Moreland says, these thousands of Jews who became believers in Jesus; "were risking the damnation of their souls to hell if they were wrong…. these changes to the Jewish social structures were not just minor adjustments that were casually made – they were absolutely monumental."